Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Personal Aside: No Matter How Massachusetts Turns Out Today, the GOP Has Won.

Feast of Sts, Marius, Audifax and Abachum.* Fear Not: The GOP Has Already Won in Massachusetts.

No matter what happens in Massachusetts today…whether Scott Brown or Martha Coakley wins…the Republicans have scored a climatic victory. For the deepest blue state in the nation, Massachusetts, to be in such trouble that it has to summon its full battery of Dem congressional robots marching in lockstep and a panicky Democratic president to rev them up, is phenomenal. The Bay State has elected Republican governors aplenty but no GOP senator for 42 years, since Barbara Walters’ old adulterous lover (he’s now 90), Ed Brooke became the first black U.S. Senator to be elected by popular vote in U.S. history.

Massachusetts electing a Republican senator particularly in the hallowed “Kennedy seat” a family heirloom since John knocked off Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. in 1952, 58 years ago? It’s almost as unthinkable as if Cook county including Chicago were on the verge of tipping Republican! So even if Coakley wins, the hair-breadth escape will never be forgotten—and presages a wholesale conservative Republican electoral tsunami to hit Congress later this year and the election of a Republican president in 2012.

In fact, I think that Martha Coakley may slither through with vote manipulations the Dems are famous for. You can talk about Easterners and Chicagoans but the Irish domination is the same, even when the players aren’t Irish…even when they’re black.

Example in Cook: The presidency of the Cook county board is second only to the mayor of Chicago. When in 2006 aged warrior and stolid Daley ally John Stroger, a black but, race aside, an endowed senior son of the Irish, suffered a severe stroke just before the primary, no one knew whether he was alive or dead. He may have been a vegetable; he may have been dead. No major matter: The Squid kept him on ice long enough and the public in the dark for days for him…either vegetative or dead… to defeat Forrest Claypool 63% to 47%.

Then three months later the dead man was, as Democratic nominee, replaced by Dem committee vote with his son, Todd. Then it was announced that John had died. No sooner was old John in the ground then there was doubt about Todd’s abilities. Voila! Barack Obama came out and endorsed Todd. That was all that mattered.

Similarly in Massachusetts: When John graduated from the senate to the presidency, there was an interim seat-warmer for the Kennedy family without the slightest qualifications except that he was an old retainer for the Kennedy family who nobody knew—and nobody cared to know for it didn’t matter who he was.

His name: Benjamin A. Smith II. Benjamin A. Smith II had been a Harvard roommate of John Kennedy. So he was appointed by the Democratic governor, Foster Furcolo, at the wish of the Kennedys for the purpose of “extending unity”—meaning to do what the family ordered him to. Benjamin Smith II was instructed to hold the seat until Teddy turned 30, the requisite age for a senator. Smith did and Ted was elected 47 years ago in 1962, it started a litany of years when election was merely a formality for him—nine straight terms.

By 1990 what was the handsomest Kennedy was at age 58 well on the way to physical ruin—a ruin protected by the same supine media that nurtured his brothers—and guard all representatives of liberalism today. Let me list them—in Washington and here, who are protected by the notoriously complaisant media. No, on second thought, I will not. Let the late Michael Kelly do it about Ted (Kelly later was killed as a reporter in Iraq).

Up Close: No Don’t Go There.

“Up close,” wrote Michael Kelly who interviewed him that year for Gentleman’s Quarterly, “the face is a shock. The skin has gone from red roses to gin blossoms. The tracery of burst capillaries shines faintly through the scaly scarlet patches that cover the bloated, mottled cheeks. The nose that was once straight and narrow is now swollen and bulbous, with open pores and a bump of what looks like scar tissue near the tip. Deep corrugations crease the forehead and angle from the nostrils and the down-turned corners of the mouth. The Chiclet teeth are the color of old piano keys. The eyes have yellowed too and they are so bloodshot it looks as if he’s been weeping.”

Only the media protected him from his carelessness and disgrace. Kelly: “Sometimes, especially in the evenings, he seems a Senator Bedfellow figure, an aging Irish boyo clutching a bottle and diddling a blonde…For his hard public drinking, his obsessive public womanizing and his frequent boorishness, he has become a late-century legend, Teddy the Terrible, the Kennedy Untrammeled. In Washington, it seems as if everyone knows someone who has slept with Kennedy, has been invited to sleep with Kennedy, seen Kennedy drunk, been insulted by Kennedy.”

But the Kennedy family of 2004…now run by Ted the patriarch… wanted more than control of one Massachusetts seat. They wanted control of both. So plans were made that year that if John Kerry were to be elected president there would be no danger the Republican Governor, Mitt Romney, would be able to appoint a GOP successor.

Changing the Rules.

So Teddy caused the Massachusetts legislature, part of the Democratic machine to change the law so that there would be no appointment but a special election four months after. Well, Romney moved on and there was a Democratic successor as governor, Deval Patrick, a Chicagoan whose campaign was orchestrated by David Axelrod. Then when Ted took ill he wanted the Democrats to have a senator right away. so he caused a change again: an appointment to fill the vacancy by the Democratic governor and a special election four months hence. The appointment went to Kennedy family faithful retainer Paul Kirk who is this generation’s Benjamin A. Smith II—and following this a special election which is being held today.

The Massachusetts Dems dictated that Irish Catholic pro-abort Martha Coakley would get the seat—not a bad choice when one reflects that she won her attorney general election by some 74%. Ah but events which no one, not even the Kennedys can affect, intervened. After Ted went to join the graves at Arlington beside his two brothers just down the hill from the Custis Mansion, marked by the flickering of the eternal flame, no one reckoned on the political backlash that has come from the unwise Obama decision to pile on higher spending, a universal health care that will send our debt into mega-trillions, additional regulations and embody the nation’s life-saving processes with the same efficiency that runs the U.S. Postal Service.

What’s Likely to Happen Now?

Understand one thing clearly: the Democratic party would be well served if Scott Brown were to win the Senate seat and, depriving the Democratic majority of its 60th vote, signify an end to the terrible health care issue which Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are force-feeding the people of the United States. The worst thing that can happen to the Dems is that this disgraceful thing is passed. It will be a crown of thorns for three generations. Bitterness will rent the Democratic majorities…all except the subservient, plantation blacks…and Republican presidents will rule once again as they did with only one exception (the very conservative Cleveland) from Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson.

But fate is not likely to smile on Democrats. Like the Teddy of old they are intoxicated with themselves. The worst that can happen is that Brown wins and the Dems do what old frog-like Barney Frank lisped noisily to his boyfriend at Fannie Mae they would try—fight the election with every tool at their command and stall Brown’s seating long enough that the Kennedy seat-warmer Paul Kirk can vote for health care. Bitterness will be so engendered that it will last as long with the Democrats as did the Reconstruction carpet-baggers the Republicans which alienated the South from the GOP for the next one hundred ten years.

Given that Ted Kennedy was sworn in two days after his election, a stonewalling would be disaster—but the media are so obsessed with liberalism that they would argue for it…cheering the delays on… misleading the Dems and pushing them over the precipice to deserved public opprobrium.

If Coakley wins by an eyelash the bitterness of the electorate will be unprecedented as well. Health care will be passed as the abortion of fixes and deals that it is and the public will be outraged. Republicans will campaign on the pledge to rescind it and will be rewarded.

Well, Republicans, with conditions like this, you cannot lose. Let us await the election returns and whatever decision is made, understand it is all to the good—resulting in the destruction of a wrongheadedly obtuse and malevolent political party of the Left.

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*: Sts, Marius, Martha, Audifax and Abachum, Martyrs [circa AD 260].Marius was a nobleman of Persia who with his wife Martha and two sons Audifax and Abachum were converted. Marius and Martha followed literally the advice Christ gave the rich young man. Marius gave his fortune to the poor and came to Rome to visit the tombs of the apostles. Emperor Claudius was waging a persecution and rounded them up Marius and his two sons were beheaded and Martha drowned 13 miles from Rome. They were buried on the Via Cornelia and their names are mentioned with distinction in all the Church’s martyrologies.

About Tom

Thomas F. Roeser is radio talk show host, writer, lecturer, teacher and former VP of The Quaker Oats Company of Chicago. A former John F. Kennedy Fellow, Harvard and Woodrow Wilson International Fellow, Princeton, N. J., Roeser is theauthor of the book Father Mac: The Life and Times of Ignatius D. McDermott. To read more about Tom, Click here.